🇨🇳🎵 Douyin Trending Tracker — Chinese TikTok Hot List & Viral Topics

Track what is actually trending on Douyin (抖音 / Chinese TikTok) right now — the live hot list (热榜), structured into clean rows you can drop straight into a China social-listening, consumer-research or brand-intelligence pipeline.

Douyin is the Bytedance-owned short-video super-app that TikTok was forked from, and its hot list is one of the highest-signal real-time mirrors of what mainland-China consumers, fans and creators are talking about. This actor surfaces that hot list as machine-readable JSON — topic, rank, category, view count, branded-partnership flag and a best-effort English translation — without you needing a Chinese phone number, a CN VPN, or a signed Bytedance mobile token.

Built for brand and marketing teams, consumer-trend researchers and offshore China-watchers who need the Douyin trend signal as data, not as a dashboard screenshot.

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What you can do with it

• Social listening / consumer intelligence — capture the live Douyin hot list on a schedule and store it for trend tracking, share-of-conversation and topic-emergence analysis.
• Brand & competitor monitoring — filter on is_branded_partnership to see which trending topics carry Douyin's paid-collaboration disclosure, a proxy for live creator-economy ad activity.
• Consumer research — bucket trends with the built-in category classifier (beauty/fashion/food/tech/etc.) to read what categories are surging with Chinese consumers.
• China-watching from offshore — read the mainland conversation in English via the best-effort topic_english_translation field, without a CN account.

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What you get per record

Field	Type	Description
rank	int	The topic's position on Douyin's hot list (1 = hottest)
topic	string	The Chinese hashtag / trending keyword (verbatim)
topic_english_translation	string | null	Best-effort English rendering (brand names, common phrases, public figures, event terms). Heuristic lookup, not full machine translation. null when include_translation is false
category	string	Canonical category from a built-in classifier: entertainment / social / political / sports / tech / lifestyle / food / fashion / education / gaming / travel
view_count	int | null	Douyin's hot-value / view metric, when surfaced by the source
video_count	int | null	Number of videos attached to the trend, when surfaced
top_creator_handle	string | null	Originating creator handle, when surfaced
is_branded_partnership	bool	True when the topic carries Douyin's paid-collaboration disclosure (广告 / 品牌合作 / 商务合作)
data_source	string	Provenance — the exact probe path used (e.g. tophub.today (Douyin hot-list mirror), douyin.com/hot (httpx), aweme.snssdk.com, douyin.com/hot (playwright))
as_of_timestamp	string	UTC ISO-8601 capture time

Many fields are nullable on purpose: Douyin's anti-bot wall means not every source path exposes every field on every run. Records are typed for downstream pipelines that expect nulls.

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Input

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
limit	integer	30	Max trending records to return (1–200). Douyin's official hot list surfaces ~50 topics
categories	array	[]	Restrict to one or more categories (entertainment, social, political, sports, tech, lifestyle, food, fashion, education, gaming, travel). Empty = all
include_translation	boolean	true	Add the topic_english_translation field
min_view_count	integer	0	Drop topics whose view count is below this threshold (0 = no filter)
proxyConfiguration	object	RESIDENTIAL	Apify proxy. RESIDENTIAL is strongly recommended — Bytedance blocks datacenter IPs aggressively

Sample input

{
  "limit": 30,
  "categories": ["entertainment", "social", "lifestyle"],
  "include_translation": true,
  "min_view_count": 0,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"]
  }
}

Sample output (truncated, schema-accurate)

[
  {
    "rank": 1,
    "topic": "华为Mate 70 Pro 首销",
    "topic_english_translation": "Huawei Mate 70 Pro first sale trending",
    "category": "tech",
    "view_count": 184000000,
    "video_count": 124000,
    "top_creator_handle": null,
    "is_branded_partnership": false,
    "data_source": "tophub.today (Douyin hot-list mirror)",
    "as_of_timestamp": "2026-05-14T10:42:01Z"
  },
  {
    "rank": 2,
    "topic": "国足战平叙利亚",
    "topic_english_translation": "China national football team draws Syria",
    "category": "sports",
    "view_count": 92000000,
    "video_count": null,
    "top_creator_handle": null,
    "is_branded_partnership": false,
    "data_source": "tophub.today (Douyin hot-list mirror)",
    "as_of_timestamp": "2026-05-14T10:42:01Z"
  }
]

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How it gets the data

Douyin runs the most aggressive anti-bot detection of any mainland consumer platform — Bytedance owns the full stack (mobile-API request signing via a closed-source WASM blob, browser fingerprinting, edge CDN), and datacenter IPs are blocked within seconds. The actor uses a defence-in-depth probe waterfall so a single blocked path does not kill the run:

1. Aweme mobile API probe — aweme.snssdk.com/aweme/v1/hot/search/list (cheap; usually returns 412 to unsigned requests, occasionally relaxed).
2. Public hot-list page — douyin.com/hot and douyin.com/discover, parsing the server-rendered __INITIAL_STATE__ / RENDER_DATA blob when present.
3. Aggregator fallback — tophub.today re-publishes the Douyin hot list as a static table; in practice the most reliable path.
4. Playwright headless Chromium — stealth countermeasures (webdriver patch, zh-CN locale, Asia/Shanghai timezone), retried against the aggregator if the direct probe is blocked.
5. Maintenance-stub fallback — if every path is blocked, the actor emits a single status: "maintenance" row so downstream pipelines never crash.

All paths run behind Apify's RESIDENTIAL proxy pool by default.

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FAQ

Can I track Douyin trends without a Chinese phone number or VPN? Yes. The actor runs server-side behind Apify proxies and returns the hot list as JSON — no CN account, phone number or VPN on your side.

Is this Douyin or international TikTok? This is mainland Douyin (抖音) — the original Bytedance app and its hot list (热榜), not the TikTok International catalog.

How fresh is the data? Each run captures the hot list live at run time and stamps every record with as_of_timestamp. The actor has no internal scheduler; schedule it in Apify (e.g. hourly) for a continuous feed. Douyin's hot list itself refreshes every few minutes, so running more often than ~5 minutes apart is wasteful.

What happens if Douyin blocks the request? You get a single status: "maintenance" row, not a crash — treat it as a "retry in a few minutes" signal. Bytedance rotates anti-bot policy roughly weekly.

How accurate is the English translation? It is a lightweight heuristic substitution of brand names, public figures and common phrases — useful for gist, not a full machine-translation pipeline. Set include_translation to false to skip it.

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Related actors — NexGenData China social-listening fleet

Pair Douyin with the rest of the NexGenData Chinese-social fleet for full cross-platform coverage:

• Weibo Hot Search Tracker — China's #1 social-trending barometer (微博热搜榜): top ranked keywords, heat score, category and 新/热/沸 flags.
• RedNote (Xiaohongshu) Scraper — trending posts, feeds and notes from Xiaohongshu (小红书 / RedNote) for beauty/fashion/lifestyle consumer-intent signal.
• Bilibili Video Search — keyword search across Bilibili (B站), the long-form video, gaming and education hub of mainland China.
• Kuaishou Trending Tracker — trending short-video signal from Kuaishou (快手), Douyin's main short-video rival, skewing lower-tier-city audiences.
• Douban Tracker — China movie/TV ratings and hot lists from Douban (豆瓣), the cultural-taste signal.
• China Trends Tracker — cross-platform Chinese trend roll-up (Weibo / Baidu / Toutiao / Douyin) to confirm whether a topic has jumped platforms.
• Chinese Social Signals MCP — MCP server that plugs the whole Chinese-social fleet directly into Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor.

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Notes & limits

• Residential proxy strongly recommended. Datacenter IPs are blocked within seconds; the default proxy group is RESIDENTIAL.
• Maintenance fallback is by design. A status: "maintenance" row means the feed was temporarily blocked — retry shortly.
• Translation is intentionally lightweight. Heuristic substitution only; full MT is out of scope.
• Pay-per-event billing. You pay per delivered record; maintenance-stub rows are not the intended billable signal.